iCloud Drive to offer “optimized storage,” desktop sharing

The updated version of iCloud Drive will automatically store your Mac’s older documents in the cloud, Apple officials announced Monday, making room on your hard drive for new and recently used files.

The changes were announced by Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, during the WWDC 2016 keynote speech. The update iCloud will be available with the macOS update appears in the fall.

The iCloud update will offer an “optimized storage” feature that also automatically dumps trash, cleans up old caches, and removes other redundant data to help preserve storage on your Mac; a demo of the feature showed it taking a computer with 20GB of free space and increasing that to 150 GB of free space.

iCloud will also make it possible for users to share items on their Mac desktops to other Macs, as well as to their iPhones. Users have already stored more than 10 billion documents on iCloud, Federighi said.